Free as in awesome: our favorite open source apps for Ubuntu 12.04

A roundup of great apps you can install on Ubuntu 12.04

Ubuntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin, was released last week, and I’ve been updating my Linux boxes to the shiny new version of the operating system. The upgrade system has gotten a lot smoother in recent years, but I still like to do a fresh installation for each release on my PC and netbook. In this short roundup, I’ll look at some great third-party applications that you can get from the Software Center to augment your Ubuntu installation.

Word processing: LibreOffice, which is included by default in Ubuntu 12.04, has made a lot of progress since it was forked from OpenOffice.org. The developers are adding features, removing bloat, and generally delivering a better user experience. Despite these advances, I still find myself occasionally wanting a lightweight word processor with less overhead, particularly for quick document viewing. Abiword meets those requirements, and also offers a great user interface with a more native look and feel.

Graphics: The GIMP, a powerful open source application for editing raster images, is very popular among Linux enthusiasts. But users who are looking for a less complicated alternative might prefer Pinta, a more intuitive application that is better suited for day-to-day tasks. For vector art, you can’t beat Inkscape, an impressive application that is both powerful and easy to use. If you are into 3D graphics, then you won’t want to miss Blender, a versatile tool that supports 3D modeling, texturing, animation, and many other capabilities.

Productivity: The popular Tomboy note-taking application was removed in Ubuntu 12.04, but it’s easy to install from the Software Center. It’s still a great choice for users, but there are a number of other good options available. Zim, for example, supports wiki-inspired linking like Tomboy but offers a more elaborate system for note organization. Another great productivity application that I like to use on Ubuntu is GTG, a to-do list application that supports the “Getting Things Done” methodology.

Multimedia: My favorite video player for Ubuntu is Totem, the one that is included in the default installation. It’s powered by GStreamer, the standard multimedia framework of the GNOME desktop environment. You can get support for a wide range of video formats in Totem and other GStreamer-based applications by installing the restricted extras metapackage or just the GStreamer ffmpeg package. Some users prefer VLC, which is also available from the Software Center. If you are looking for a media center application that you can control from the couch, you might want to check out XBMC.

Editors: Vim or Emacs, need I say more? Of course, there are also plenty of options available for heathens those of you who prefer less powerful alternatives. Scite, Leafpad, and Geany are all popular choices. You can also install a bunch of plugins to increase the capabilities of GEdit, the GNOME text editor that comes with Ubuntu. For simple distraction-free editing, you could try PyRoom. If you are working with Markdown or reStructured text, you might want to try ReText.

IDEs: I’m a big fan of Qt Creator, a clean and simple development environment for building applications with the Qt toolkit. It has a visual form designer, an integrated debugging interface, and other tools that simplify Qt development. If you are looking to build Gtk+ and GNOME applications, you might want to check out MonoDevelop and Anjuta. The highly-extensible Eclipse IDE is also useful to install, especially if you are planning to do Java or Android development.

There are thousands of other applications available through the Software Center, many of which are supplied by Debian’s massive package repository. What are you some of your favorites?